Why not print $50 Trillion and send out $15,000 checks?

Tomato or tomato. U.S. is significantly growing the national debt. U.S. will increase the amount of T-Bills, T-Notes & T-Bonds on the open market. What will the high roller nations think of U.S. after three or so more months of a few trillion here and a few trillion there set on fire? This is not like incurring national debt for interstate highway project of late 1950s and 1960s. This is not like intercontinental railroad project of 1860s. U.S. is incurring this debt to keep saloons, salon owners and nail salons whole. Airlines who have been taking their profits to buy their equity shares on open market are getting a rescue package. There was a method to the madness of Senator Sanders plan to pay off all student loans for a total cost of only 1.5 trillion. Think of all those college graduates with a reset. All those intelligent college graduates could have followed their dreams and could have done what they wanted to do without being a slave to their student loan payments. I truly hope you do not believe it actually makes a difference: U.S. increases M-1 or U.S. issues more T-Bills, T-Notes & T-Bonds. One day the high rollers of Monaco, Luxembourg and Switzerland are going to stop buying U.S. bonds. Bonds and bond yields have an inverse relationship.

sounds like a plan. $1200 a month for all AMERICANS. Enough giving welfare to the world. Time for a Universal Basic Income for AMERICANS.

Its clear our economy is all imaginary anyways. $1200 a month isnt going to be enough to stop people from working, and provides a safety net for those who aren't and a nice extra stimulus for those with jobs.

I highly recommend a book called The Creature From Jekyll Island, which is a history of the banking system in the United States upto and since the creation of the Federal Reserve, which is a socialist style privately owned central banking system. Not the only book out there, but of all the ones I've perused, probably the most comprehensive. Make sure to get the latest updated version if you can. If you read it you'll probably be so damn mad at the Fed and Congress you'll feel like nuking Washington, DC.

This book does a good job of explaining why an economy based on gold/silver/precious metals, etc (what the USA was up until 1913, then FDR made it illegal to own 'x' amount of gold, then Nixon took us off the gold standard so the government wouldn't be required to actually pay you in gold if you turned in the Federal Rerserve Debt Notes - what your dollar actually is) is much more stable and that paper (or these days, electronic) money is always inflationary, which means that it loses value over time. Printing more money will only devalue or make the current money in circulation LESS valuable. This is deflation, loss of value. The reciprocal of this is inflation, where prices go up in response to the money being LESS valuable. So the 1$ soft drink becomes, say $1.10. Subtle, but inflation is the REAL tax on money. Only the people who get the money in the first few months of it being printed can use its new value before it floods the economy, filters down, and suddenly loses its value. This is part of the reason of Boom and Busts through the years. So one can rightly say that increasing the money supply is the equivalent of inflation. You are inflating the amount which inflates prices because the more you have, the less it's worth. But here's the kicker, and what FedReserve Bank Presidents have admitted under oath. If you paid back every single debt note/dollar in circulation; that is, if everyone paid off their debts, mortgages, loans, etc, there would be NO money in circulation...and we'd return to the classic barter/gold system of bygone eras...and they sure as hell will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening...paper money, like electronic money is essentially worthless unless people keep faith in it...which is slowly ebbing with each crisis...to answer the one poster...if you're house gets revalued at 500K from 400K because of inflation, it doesn't mean you house is more valuable...it means your money is less valuable because it takes more of it to purchase the equivalent...and yes, under a more free market the stock market would be much lower as most of its gains the last few years are artificial, government propped up gains...

The best thing to do is get government out of the way and let market corrections and the ingenuity of people respond to the mess they've purposefully made out of this 'crisis' to extend their control over the banks/hospitals/public life. I know there are many who fear free markets, but in all honesty, none of us living today have ever known one, so what would it hurt to at least try it for a few years...if you can't even conceive of any solution other than a government solution you're already intoxicated on the KoolAid leading to communism...

Thanks for the reading suggestion.

There is a fundamental problem with our economy: it depends on infinite growth on a finite planet. Everything we see with these cycles is a result of our contrived system butting heads with the hard reality of physical truth. Equilibrium is not a natural state; Economics isn’t in reality with entropy.

In order to keep the game going, we are going to see a debt jubilee at some point. It might be explicit or it might be de facto (through sustained inflation) but I don’t see another way forward.

We are living in a quasi-MMT world already. The real problem with MMT is when enough folks become “woke” and decide they don’t want to participate

And yes, OP’s suggestion is a perfectly reasonable criticism of the present madness..